BUYING IN

For the Padres, market size is a state of mindand they're thinking big as they chase their first championship. Their spending binge raises questions. Could it really work? And don't you wish your team's owner acted like this?

- Stephanie Apstein

MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL had a problem. It was 1968, A's owner Charlie Finley had just moved his team from Kansas City to Oakland, and Missouri Senator Stuart Symington was threatening to revoke the league's antitrust exemption, the carve-out that allows the sport to operate as a legal monopoly. To placate Symington, baseball's 20 owners agreed to create the Royals, plus three other teams.

Walter O'Malley, the Dodgers' owner and the most powerful man in baseball, suggested that one franchise go to San Diego. It was a clever bit of maneuvering by him. O'Malley arranged for the Dodgers' team president, Buzzie Bavasi, to become a part owner, thus freeing up Bavasi's job for O'Malley's son, Peter. And as a market, San Diego came with some competitive disadvantages; as Bavasi would later say, it was hemmed in by Mexico to the south, the desert to the east, the Pacific Ocean to the west and Vin Scully to the north. O'Malley was basically giving his own team a neighbor to torment a dozen or more times a year.

More often than not over the next half century, that's exactly what happened. During the 1970s, while the Dodgers carried hefty payrolls and saw the results, the cash-strapped Padres once asked players to wait three days to deposit their checks. In '74 the team needed a $71,000 advance from the city of San Diego. Finances were so dire in '92 that the team did away with its lobby Christmas tree.